{"id":10022,"date":"2024-01-21T15:21:27","date_gmt":"2024-01-21T21:21:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/?p=10022"},"modified":"2024-01-21T15:21:27","modified_gmt":"2024-01-21T21:21:27","slug":"shopping-daze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/archives\/shopping-daze\/","title":{"rendered":"Shopping Daze"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We spent most of Saturday morning doing the semi-monthly grocery shopping run; a rather abbreviated run as it turns out, as my daughter has some houses to show on Sunday to clients who work Monday-Friday. We have given up driving to New Braunfels once a month to drop a goodly lot of money on meats from Granzin. This is lamentable, as Granzin\u2019s sausages and the various meats, fresh, marinated, smoked and dried were absolutely prime and relatively inexpensive, but with Wee Jamie, a full schedule of real estate stuff for my daughter, and the nerve-wracking drive on a busy highway \u2026 road trips like that were just not something we can keep on doing \u2013 and never mind the hours\u2019 long trip to Pflugerville or Victoria to the Aldi outlet.\u00a0<em>(That\u2019s for when we are going in that direction for something else, anyway.)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The cost of most grocery staples has gone up, making certain economies necessary. I\u2019m accustomed to cooking most things from scratch and have lived through patches of extreme economy and a limited budget, so the shopping list doesn\u2019t include much in the way of frozen prepared items anymore \u2013 just basic ingredients. As my daughter says \u2013 \u2018We are Old Poor, compared to the New Poor,\u2019 for whom necessary austerity must bite very hard in the last year or so. But even basic ingredients have increased in price, to the point where now the military base commissaries offer a better deal than HEB, the Texas grocery chain, which has a huge distribution center here in San Antonio, and which has run just about every other national chain out of the state. (It\u2019s a small town indeed, which doesn\u2019t rate a HEB grocery outlet.)<\/p>\n<p>This wasn\u2019t always the case. When I first came to Texas, assigned to the video production unit at Lackland AFB, it was honestly even money whether HEB offered better pricing than the Commissary \u2013 various HEB locations certainly offered a wider selection than the commissaries, which mostly featured national big-name brands, and offered in-store bakeries and deli counters and numerous Texas-local brands. After so about a decade and a half of having the base commissary as the only and often limited grocery option, I was glad to shift my grocery-purchasing custom to HEB, and the lavish array of staples and specialty foods on offer, and to either Costo or Sam\u2019s Club for items we used in quantity. We still do Costco, for certain items, and Chewy for pet food \u2026 but we\u2019re back to making a commissary runs twice a month. It turns out that the DOD has extended commissary and PX access to veterans across the board, not just retirees, which means that my daughter can shop there for baby and toddler food for Wee Jamie, as the prices for the brands that we favor for him are somewhat less expensive \u2013 one thing that has changed for the better, I guess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We spent most of Saturday morning doing the semi-monthly grocery shopping run; a rather abbreviated run as it turns out, as my daughter has some houses to show on Sunday to clients who work Monday-Friday. We have given up driving to New Braunfels once a month to drop a goodly lot of money on meats [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aint-that-america","category-domestic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10022"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10022\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10023,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10022\/revisions\/10023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}